


Bygones

by englishable



Series: Hieros Gamos [5]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-24
Updated: 2019-05-24
Packaged: 2020-03-13 10:42:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,666
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18939298
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/englishable/pseuds/englishable
Summary: In which Sif and Thor finally address the Jane Foster Question. It has been a long time in coming, but overall Thor thinks it goes far better than anticipated.





	Bygones

…

The orange envelope is eight inches wide by eleven inches long and has been sealed with two folded metal tabs at its top, in addition to about a yard of packaging tape around its seams. It is postmarked from 215 Jennings Road, Culver University in Willowdale, Virginia, USA, rubber-stamped all over with return-to-sender notices that date back several months. The mail carrier flings it at Thor as though dispelling a curse.

Inside is a note from Darcy Lewis, penned in sparkling purple ink – hope you’re doing okay; Erik says hi; I charged the postage costs for this to the Political Science Department’s overhead account and if you tell anybody I swear I’ll taser you again – and paper-clipped to an article from _The Scientific American_ that includes a full-color photograph of Jane.

Thor carries it upstairs to read. 

His office window affords him a view down onto the docks of New Asgard and has been propped open with an empty green ginger ale bottle. A sign at the bottom of the stairs specifies that the king’s hours of audience are between one o’clock and two-thirty every Thursday. Thor, who returned to New Asgard four months ago following his wanderer’s absence of nearly a year, has made this sign by punching out the bottom to a tin-coated steel paint can and pounding it flat with an ordinary tack hammer.

He sits at his desk and runs his fingers up the magazine clipping’s sharp edges. The article informs its readers that Dr. Jane Foster has been awarded a three-year research grant from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration for the study of near-field cosmology, and that she will be publishing a book through the Culver University Press about the astrophysics of interstellar space travel.  The book's announced title is _The Worlds Tree._

The photograph has captured Jane glancing up from a notebook into the camera, her cinnamon-brown hair loose and drifting up into the light. She is smiling, her eyes bright, which unwittingly prompts Thor to smile back.

The office door creaks open. Thor looks up to find Sif standing there  – she has been helping to scale a large catch of fish at the docks; she wears squeaking red boots and has shoved a pair of gardening gloves into her back pocket – but his wife stops when she sees the opened envelope and the article in his hands.

She comes inside and shuts the door.

Sif stands behind him and reads over his shoulder. Thor waits until she is finished, although he answers her questions when she asks them: Where exactly on the map is Virginia, how is the man Erik Selvig getting by after Loki stayed so long inside his head, would you like to purchase a copy of the book, what does the girl mean here in her letter when she threatens ‘again’?

She does not ask about Jane, at least not directly, until the very end.

“We all took bets once, you know,” Sif says, “about just what sort of woman would be the one to finally get a hold on you. None of us could’ve supposed it would be a mortal, though – not even a mortal so uncommon amongst her own kind as this one.”

 “Jane would not be common anywhere.”

“No, I suppose she wouldn’t.”

Thor sets the article down and smooths out a crease through its middle. His hands pass over the printed name of the woman he once thought would be the great love of his life.

(I can’t do this anymore, she had said. I mean, I can’t keep waiting for – I don’t know what I’m waiting for, exactly. I just know I have a life and I need to keep living it. I guess we always figured it was going to end this way, didn’t we? I’m sorry.)

Sif picks a loose lock of hair off Thor’s shoulder and plays delicately with it while she allows him time to think. She curls and uncurls the very end of the hair around the finger that bears her wedding ring, as the mortals wear it, a steel band set with a piece of polished amber. Thor’s ring is made from steel as well and he studies it, spinning it with his thumb; he remembers how Sif’s eyes had followed him in those days after his return from exile, how she had looked at Jane when he brought her to Asgard, how she had turned with her sword in hand to buy him time on the day he took the Aether to Malekith.

You would be better served, his father had once told him, by what lies in front of you.

A lightbulb snaps on in Thor’s brain, although it terms of sheer force and heady effect it is somewhat more like shotgunning a beer: except no beer ever went to his head this quickly, and it has been almost a year since he drank anything stronger than black coffee with a shot of chocolate syrup for taste.

Still, it is quite the discovery.

“You were jealous of her,” Thor says.  

His wife sets the lock of hair down and picks lint off his sleeve. “That’s a rather impertinent thing to tell the woman you share a bed with, your majesty.”

“I’d find a way to be impertinent regardless of the circumstances, Lady Sif. It happens to be a talent of mine.”

“I’ve noticed.” She turns at the same time as Thor swivels around in his second-hand chair to face her.  “I envied her. There’s a difference.”

“What?” Thor laughs. He is fairly sure his eyes are sparkling from delighted disbelief, but he sees something else in Sif’s face that tempers him. “What difference might that be?”

“Jealousy is the possessiveness felt for a thing you may rightly be able to call your own. Envy is the desire to have a thing that is not yours and may never be.” Sif takes a step back. She surveys him, from his eyes to his feet to the magazine clipping on his desk, and something softens around the lines of her mouth. “If you returned to her now, I wouldn’t try to stop you.”

“You –” Thor frowns. His mouth is still half-cocked into a smile at some joke he was readying to make. “That’s a rather impertinent thing to tell the man you’ve married, your majesty.”

“And I would marry that man over again if he asked,” she says. “But I’ve never been able to keep you where you don’t wish to be. Nobody has and I wouldn’t want to – a first love isn’t something a man’s likely to forget, however long he lives.”

She smiles.

A ship bell clangs in the harbor. A pick-up truck with its muffler shaking loose clatters by in the cobblestone street below and several young girls are playing under Thor’s office window; Valkyrie has been sending them postcards from some place called Australia and they squabble over who gets first reading privileges. Everyone in the village of New Asgard can be fitted into the little parquet-floored public hall they use for official ceremonies, the men and the women and the children who will remember nothing else. With a bit of crowding they can even sit at the same long, angled dining table, while Thor stands incongruously in the place of honor and either recalls or improvises the All-Father’s ceremonial prayers for health and wisdom and victory; he usually substitutes the request for victory with a request for strength, but nobody seems to note the change.

And he has made Sif the queen of it all, Thor thinks, there with her stained gloves and her squeaking boots and her flannel shirt that smells of salt water and oakum. In another life, when he was another man, the ceremony for their wedding would have lasted a full three days and nights; she would have walked to him down the throne room wearing a crown of mountain wildflowers atop that shining blackberry-bright hair; he would have lifted this crown from her head and exchanged it for a silver diadem set with crystals that had been first worn by his grandmother.

(Loki would have been the one tasked with holding open the sacred texts from which the king and his bride read their vows, as Thor might have someday done for his brother if he married, although Loki would have doubtless made the words change shape to mean something else.)

Thor puts the article aside and reclines in his chair.

“I don’t think it’s fair that you can be so charitable about this,” he says. “You wouldn’t prize me so highly if you knew the awful misfortunes I wished on that moron Haldor while you were still going with him.”

The wistful expression is knocked clean off his wife’s face. She blinks.

“Haldor?” Sif repeats. “You remember him?”

“If I could forget him, I would’ve done it by now. He once asked me whether mutton was from the front or hind part of the cow – I mean, Odin’s beard, why did it have to be him?”

Which is a superfluous question, since Thor knows the answer. Haldor was a young commissioned officer who took a fancy to Sif when she was about twenty, a spry-heeled and curly-haired cad who did not know how to pick his fights or shut his mouth or keep his hands from wandering over Sif’s rear end. Sif had seemed to take a skittish pleasure in the whole business while it lasted and Thor had once or twice cheered himself with daydreams of cracking the man’s head through a table: all in the spirit of camaraderie, he had thought at the time, and as the sort of normal vetting any friend would do for another. Whether this was jealousy or envy he cannot decide now, but when Haldor had left Sif to chase after another woman Thor had elevated himself to the much more enjoyable and less guilt-addled fantasies of pitching the man out a window like a bale of hay.  

Sif’s hand flits over her mouth to hide a laugh.

“Well –” she pats the flat space below her throat, “—well, he was exceptionally good-looking. ‘Strapping,’ I suppose the word would be. That had a great deal to do with it.”

“Did it?” Thor folds his arms across his chest and sits a little taller. “I’ll assume your standards have since improved.”

“He was something of a romantic, too." Sif puts her fingers beside her head as though in imitation of long ears or horns. "He once brought me a set of bilgesnipe antlers for a present.”

Thor looks towards Stormbreaker, rested atop its heavy iron pegs on the wall behind him. “If you’ll wait five minutes I can bring you the antlers and the rest of the damn bilgesnipe to go with it. We’ll give this village a feast it won’t recover from in a fortnight.”

“Oh, stop.” Sif laughs again and flushes a very pleasing red all the way to her ears. It makes her green eyes dance and he feels a familiar clench of longing just below his ribs. “We were having an earnest conversation and you've spoiled it.”

“On the contrary, I’d say it would be a challenge to improve this discourse any further. Unless –” he leans off the chair just far enough to grab her wrists “—ah, I know.”

He catches her off-balance as he pulls her into his lap. Her nose ends up about an inch from his, her shortened hair falling forward to shade their eyes from the sunlight through the open window. Sif’s palms come to rest against his shoulders.

(He had avoided the touch of her hands, in the beginning, knowing that this hard-used body would be different from the one she had been expecting all those centuries, and the thought of disappointing her in such a foolish way as this had made him light-headed with a sick, aching fear.

Sif had soon lost her patience with it.

Look, she had said, rolling back her sleeve over a puckered sword-scar on her right arm; look, she had said, shoving off her pants to show the pitted place where an arrow had gone into her thigh; look, she had said, showing him the burn marks on her back and stomach where fire-heated sand had once been poured off an enemy's battlement and slithered into her armor; look, she had said, parting open her shirt around the thick, vivid scar of a long-ago axe where it bit into her left breast.

Look, she had said. Look at me and tell me how unlovely I am.

"Do you want to take the rest of those clothes off yourself, _elskede_ ," Thor had told her, instead, "or can I do it for you?"

"Only if you let me take yours off in trade, _kjekken,"_ had been her answer.)

Seated on his lap, Sif lets out a long and exasperated breath. It brushes his face.

And he will never forget Jane Foster, Thor knows. He would not wish to forget her, even if he were given the chance at it, and in turn she will always carry a part of his life with her.  She has played one of the greater, better parts in making him into the man he is, and whatever sort of man he may yet become.

“Well, now you’ve got a captive audience,” Sif says. “Is that all you wanted to tell me? Perhaps you haven’t noticed it yet, but I smell like a dead fish.”

“A dead fish wearing my wife’s perfume,” Thor corrects.  He pulls at the gloves in her back pocket. “Do you remember those stories people used to tell about my mother? How they thought she could see into the future and all that?” Sif nods. “They were always running after her with the stupidest questions – the younger ones usually wanted to find out who their first love was going be.”

“I should hope a witch-queen’s foresight would be put to more useful ends than that.”

“Yes, my mother thought the same thing.” Thor takes his wife’s face in both hands. “And I'd so much rather have you be the last than the first.”

An expression flickers across Sif's face faster than he can observe it. She turns her cheek against one of his hands so that her lips touch his palm and she laces her fingers together with his.

“You really are impertinent, you know.” She closes her eyes. “You can’t just tell a woman something like that and not give her a minute to recollect herself.”

“I have a suggestion for what she might do in the meantime.”

This possibility has apparently already occurred to Sif, however, because she loops her arms around his shoulders and kisses him with such hard insistence that it tilts him slightly backwards in the chair. Thor fits his own arms around her waist while he kisses her lips and cheeks. Someone comes half-way up the stairs to the office but stops, hears something, and scurries back down along the wall so as not to make a noise; Sif presses her lips to Thor’s forehead while she muffles her laughter and Thor muffles his  laughter shortly thereafter by pulling her closer and hiding his face against the warm crook of her neck.

It is a long, long time before he lets go.

…

He writes a letter back to Darcy that includes both compensation for the expended postage and an offer to visit her at Culver University, if she and Dr. Selvig would be so inclined. Sif orders an advance copy of Jane’s book, too, which costs thirty-five US dollars in hardcover and arrives in a cardboard box with an autograph written shyly on its front flyleaf; Sif reads it mostly seated atop one of the seawalls, or else reads parts of it aloud to Thor.

“That was always your father’s way of putting it, wasn’t it?” Sif asks. “The worlds tree.”

“Yes,” Thor says. “Here – I’ll draw a picture for you.”  

...


End file.
